While it's true that women's deodorants are often more expensive than their men's counterparts, women's deodorants may contain different ingredients.Image: Shutterstock
HHave you ever noticed that deodorants marketed to women are just a little more expensive than deodorants made for “boys”?
The idea that women pay a “pink tax” on products that are seemingly identical to those marketed to men has led to several new and proposed laws aimed at ending the perception of price discrimination. connected to the law.
But this bill and the protests assume that so-called men's and women's products are actually the same. Anna Tuchman, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School, explains that new research shows there is no significant price difference between comparable products for women and men. She co-authored the study with Sarah Moshary of the University of California, Berkeley, and Natasha Bhatia of Cornerstone Research.
“Comparable” is the key word, Tuchman explains. The researchers focused on personal care products, a category where gender targeting and segmentation is pervasive. “We've found that when companies sell products for men and women, the same product is rarely sold in different colored packaging,” she says. “The prices for products for men and women are different, but this seems to be due to the different products themselves.”
In other words, while it's true that women's deodorants are often more expensive than their men's counterparts, women's deodorants may contain different ingredients. (Tuchman says moisturizers are a particularly common feature in women's products.)
This was a surprising discovery for Tuchman and his coauthors. Given the legislative action and media outcry surrounding the issue, she said, “I thought we would find strong evidence” of a pink tax. “But once we started seeing results, we came to a different conclusion.”
Compare apples to apples
The researchers first looked at the prices of nine types of personal care products marketed to both women and men: bar soaps, body washes, deodorants, hair dyes, razor blades, razors, shampoos, and shaving creams. Information collected from Nielsen. In the end, he collected three years' worth of data from about 40,000 stores across the United States.
To determine which products were aimed at women and men, the researchers used several approaches, including analyzing manufacturers' product descriptions and label designs. They also selected one of his stores, Walgreens, to see how the products were categorized on the website. We then used a product ingredient database to compare product similarities.
A closer look at the ingredients in each product reveals significant differences between those marketed to men and women. This is an important finding because the proposed federal pink tax bill targets “substantially similar” products.
Among the relatively small number of products that are truly comparable, “we didn't find any significant price differences,” Tuchman says. In some categories, there were small price differences between men's and women's products, but this does not necessarily put women at a disadvantage. Eventually, small differences will be “washed out between categories.”
In fact, the study found that the average household could save less than 1% by switching to a comparable product aimed at a different gender. If households switched to gender-targeted and differently formulated products, the proposed savings would be even larger, closer to 10%, but it is unclear whether consumers actually want that. Not. After all, today nothing prevents women from buying cheap and less moisturizing blue deodorants, but many do not.
In other words, Tuchman says, “If people really like the product formulation they choose, there's not a lot of money left on the table.”
Also read: Gender equality is still a long way off: Report
No pink tax – just a bigger pink basket
Lack of tax evidence doesn't necessarily mean female consumers are pink.
First, the pink tax being considered here is different from the debate over whether menstrual products should be subject to a sales tax (also known as a pink tax), which many advocates believe is unfair. And a combination of marketing and culture is forcing women to purchase a wider range of personal care products in order to conform to societal norms.
“Women just have a bigger basket of goods,” Tuchman said. “Within a basket, the individual items may have the same price, but the basket is larger.” Some may think this is unfair, but this is easily explained by law alone. This is an unsolvable problem.
Understanding why companies make products with different formulations for men and women is the focus of the researchers' next paper. Why are moisturizers added to so many women's products? Is it because women want it or because marketers are creating that expectation?
“We don't have answers to those questions yet,” Tuchman says. “But I think it's very interesting.”
[This article has been republished, with permission, from Kellogg Insight, the faculty research & ideas magazine of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University]
